The Hollow Men

It’s always a mistake to let Americans loose in the literary china shop.

In my first post on this very blog, I praised Leonie Brinkema, the judge presiding over the Moussaoui trial, for conducting herself with a modicum of decency and fairness and with a minimum of prosecutorial, rah-rah-American zeal. I haven’t exactly revised that opinion, but after reading the account of the last day of sentencing, I think it's worth noting that despite a basic decency and a scrupulous fairness, Judge Brinkema has no better understanding of just what occurred in her courtroom than does the vapid American media or the vacuous American public.

In her final address to Moussaoui, Brinkema said, "As for you, Mr. Moussaoui, you came here to be a martyr and to die in a great big bang of glory, but to paraphrase the poet T. S. Eliot, instead you will die with a whimper." In the whole corpus of English literature, could she have chose a more infelicitous work than "The Hollow Men" to express our Anglo-Saxon jurisprudential triumphalism?

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Thomas Stearns ain't talkin' 'bout no Mohammedans, that’s fer damn sure. Dear Judge Brinkema, The world-ending whimpering that concludes Eliot’s poem about spiritual dessication and the dilemma of modernity ("Shape without form, shade without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture without motion") afflicts us. We are the hollow men—as if the pronouns aren’t clear enough.

Brinkema surely only knows that famous world-ending-not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper. But since Moussaoui was given to preening about America’s impending defeat at the hands of the truly faithful, it might do the judge well to reread the penultimate section of the poem:

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

Puts a rather different spin on it now, doesn’t it? (I hate to be crass, but really . . . Besides which, I object to quoting a Grail-quest, Crusader-kingdom aficionado while sentencing, ya know, a self-professed Muslim counter-crusader.)

I’m circling around the main point. Whether in The Waste Land or “The Hollow Men,” Eliot explicitly embraces despair that the West is not just declining, but declined, that out of the sight of that which is Godly and Holy, out of communion with the made world, having dissipated the spirit and abandoned communal ritual (metaphorized, in Eliot’s oeuvre, by the Grail quest more than anything else—the recherche for the venerated object-symbol of lost authenticity), having, ultimately, debased ourselves as spiritual beings, we’ve nothing left but to witness the decline of all our kingdoms, the temporal kind and the otherworldly. "There, the eyes are / Sunlight on a broken column."

I don’t share Eliot’s conclusions or convictions, of course (even less so as they metamorphosed toward High Church Anglicanism); I’m as spiritually debased as they come. But it hardly does one of our greatest poets proper service or pays him adequate respect to turn his words on their head as an indictment of a man who, after all, is making the same claims, albeit very crudely and inconsistently: that we’ve become Crusaders unaware of our own agnosticisms, searching for a golden grail rather than the sacral symbol that contains the essence of our divinity. Hell, you don’t even have to read Eliot for that. Just watch Indian Jones and the Last Crusade. "He chose . . . poorly."

Anyway, there’s an inescapable bathos to the end of this trial, as the families of the 9-11 dead got their chances to speak in open court. You don’t have to condone what Moussaoui claimed (rather fantastically, if you ask me) to have done and supported to recognize a terrible truth in his final statements. Even a monster can tell the truth. After listening to the litany of lives he’d ruined, he said: “Your humanity is a very selected humanity—only you suffer, only you feel.” That the judge then saw fit to bookend that condemnation with unintentional commentary on the hollowness of that self-professed feeling . . . well . . .

In the third year of our murderous rampage through Iraq, where we’ve killed tens of thousands in pursuit of abstract policy goals and chalked them up as unfortunate but necessary (and therefore uncountable) sacrifices, it's a shame to have to hear it from a stooge who imagines himself a soldier.

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

St. Peggy of Wall Street

Last year, the Wall Street Journal’s own flying nun, Peggy Noonan, wrote a panegyric-cum (and we do mean cum)-elegy to Pope John Paul II entitled, John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father. When writing of J.P. deux, Pegs transforms herself from virgin martyr into visionary, styling herself as a sort of post-postmodern St. Catherine de’ Ricci, which is to say blessed by an orgiastic ecstasy each week from noon on Thursday until four in the afternoon of Friday.

Now Noonan is admittedly a little light in the theology department, preferring ecstatic paganism, in which soil her One True Church sets its many roots, to catechismal drudgery. Her John Paul was half Orpheus and half Adonis, all music and beauty, so you can understand that she sometimes missed the lyrics to the song. One particular number, which you’d surely recognize if I hummed a few bars, is called Evangelium Vitae, and it goes a little something like this:

"If bloodless means are sufficient to defend human lives against an aggressor and to protect public order and the safety of persons, public authority must limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person".

Meanwhile, Pegs:

If Moussaoui didn't deserve the death penalty, who does? Who ever did?

Her point, if you can make it through the article, is that Zacarais Moussaoui is very, very bad. This has become the default position of so-called conservatives of late, that rules are rules unless someone is very, very bad. These, recall, are the people who wail about relativism and the decline of the West, even as they seek a society in which justice, and moreover a system of justice, applies or doesn’t apply by fiat and by whim.

That’s a project for Peggy’s betters, though. She’s just the Movement’s pretty-lady singer-songwriter, turning out mush like:

[The death penalty] is the expression of a certitude, of a shared national conviction, about the value of a human life.

Wrap your head around that if you can. It has a whiff of "yet each man kills the thing he loves" about it—life so precious that only in ending it do we affirm it. That sounds more like Eastern spiritism than the Word of the Vicar of Christ to me, but I was raised a Jew and born again a non-believer, and so the Thoughts of Our Father remain, alas, a mystery to me.

Noonan’s column is good for a laugh, but it’s also worth reading as an indication of a new argument sure to come down the conservatarian pike: that judges-and-juries, having failed to wind up at the conservatarians’ own foregone conclusion, have proven themselves incapable of rendering justice, which, as anyone who’s ever listened to so-called conservative legal commentators knows, is rendered pre facto as soon as "everyone knows he’s guilty" and then simply reaffirmed by the twelve schmucks in the jury box. Conservatives have long believed in justice-by-phenotype—sloping forehead or skin color, it makes little difference—and surely we’ll now hear new rounds of yelping for military tribunals or some other renamed kangaroo courts who will be charged with the world-important task of reaching the correct conclusions.

Obligatory Shelby Steele Post with Requisite Joseph Conrad Notes

It seems to me that folks are getting a wee bit too worked up about Shelby Steele's exterminate the brutes number over at the Wall Street [you'll forgive the expression] Journal. Steele isn't saying anything that Michael "Savage" Weiner hasn't been saying on his call-in show since long before the current round of genocidal fanatasism infected the fever dreams of America's inexhaustible supply of Monday-morning generals. I suppose it's always dangerous to live in a powerful society in which such vicious prattle passes for political commentary, but all the worrying seems to me to buy into the very same overestimations of our might and military wherewithal as Napoleon Steele. That is to say: the imminent danger of the US prosecuting wars as the genteel Ghostface Killah desires isn't, well, imminent.

Steele actually does a favor in laying bare the self-similarity of conservative social and military . . . thought. Just as social conservatives engage in the backward-forward projection of an idyllic social order located in the vaguely recent past, the war hawks image a past order in which wars were fought as wars ought to be fought. Why, it was practically part of the social compact! No dithering around in World War II, no way, no how--the Greatest Generation launched itself against the shores of Normandy and killed as many damn Germans and razed as many damn cities as it took to win. Hoo-ah! Their pansy boomer children, meanwhile, not only undermined two thousand years of Western moral consensus, but also pussified war by limiting it, nevermind that pussification occured pretty well and thoroughly under Truman and a bunch of WWII generals in a lil' ol' peninsual called Korea, wherein I'm informed a Evil Axis still resides.

Of course, the sort of war whose passing Steele laments was a function of the enemy we confronted. So is it true that "today the United States cannot go to war in the Third World simply to defeat a dangerous enemy?" Our Third World enemies aren't entire mechanized societies arrayed against us. In World War II, immense armies fielded by industrial nations whose entire national industries and populations were realigned and reorganized for total war clashed across whole continents and oceans. That's hardly the C.V. of our more recent conflicts, in which the rulers of United States, in order to placate the hallucinogenic madness of certain domestic constituencies, concoct theories of abstract danger and attempt to insert their clumsy fingers between one falling domino and its still-standing neighbor.

Steele's prescriptions for victory are galling only insofar as they suggest some propriety in the notion of devestating an entire nation and civilization based not on some attack or danger to the territorial integrity of the U.S., but rather upon the designation of some hapless third-world dictatorship as a "dangerous enemy." Dangerous how? Don't expect an answer.

Anyway, there's a lot of incoherent babbling about how white guilt for the sins of our imperial past proscribe manly, passionate war-making. The unintended irony is that, having made this diagnosis, Steele and his admirers propose to commit further sins of an imperial present--that we eliminate white guilt by eliminating the very peoples whose suffering at our hands in the past apparently emasculates us today. And therein lies the psychology at work throughout Conrad's work. "Exterminate the brutes!" Why? Because they are the evidence of our brutishness.

Here's the final paragraph of the article:

This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life--absorbed as new history--so that America can once again feel the moral authority to seriously tackle its most profound problems. Then, if we decide to go to war, it can be with enough ferocity to win.

The fact to which Steele refers is something about the West's great moral transformation, achieved by getting kicked out of the non-West, or something. The closing paean to ferocity is telling, though. What Steele and plenty of other total victory advocates on the right ultimately regret is that by failing to crush our so-called enemies, we permit the propagation of countervailing narratives; our victor's history isn't complete. "Minimalism," in their estimation, permits the virus of doubt to grow back from the mouths of the recently defeated; it allows the societies that we invade and try to remake to retain the capacity to speak about our crimes and our injustices. Steele wishes that we'd use sufficient force to coerce our victims into believing the great lie: that it was their wickedness which brought our retribution, not ours which brought their suffering.

For better or worse, the enemy seems unwilling to grant Steele's hypothesis that "no one--including, very likely, the insurgents themselves--believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to." For better or worse, the insurgents seem to believe precisely that. For better or worse, we'll find out, one of these days, whose assessment was more accurate.

The Meaning of No

"In Washington, Bonhomie for Saudi Oil Minister.

My favorite bit:

"Mr. Naimi," Mr. Schlesinger asked, "do you live in fear that the United States will achieve energy independence?"

The audience went quiet. Sitting in the first row was the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, Rex W. Tillerson. Among the hundred-plus guests was a large number of oil executives, government officials, industry analysts, consultants and journalists. At Mr. Naimi's right, Samuel W. Bodman, the energy secretary, smiled.

"The answer," the Saudi official said with a grin, "is no."

"Energy Independence" is the sort of catch-all political neologism created by our court propagandists to salve some collective anxiety with the poultice of euphemism. (Nation building; War on Terror; War on Drugs . . .) It has no particular meaning and refers to no particular policy or set of policies, real or imagined. Americans know that they use energy; they know that energy comes from fuel; they know that fuel is often derived from oil; they know that oil principally arrives on boats from other countries.

Energy independence is meant to signify that there exists some set of policies that will greatly reduce or eliminate our dependence on so-called foreign oil (another rather lunatic phrase, if you ask me). It suggests—it’s meant to suggest—that with at most minor conservation efforts, our society will function essentially as it does now, except that the cars will run on ethanol . . . or something.

One more platitude for the crisis-weary American public. There may have been a lot of bonhomie in Washington for the Saudi minister, and he may well have pawned off his few critics in the room with a few jokes and a nod in the direction of lower oil prices, but his sheepishness at the current price of oil—oh, yes, the Saudis too would like it to be lower—is pretty indicative of his impotence in the face of contracting supply. Where’s the excess capacity? Where are the lower prices?

Meanwhile, we’re agitating for war-or-something-like-it with Iran, because our petroimperial plan to create a friendly client state in Iraq failed, and because we still operate under the illusion that there exists under the sands of Arabia and Persia enough petrol to keep us pleasantly humming along for another century—that if only we could find some Iranian exile moderates to play the pleasant oligarchs at Washington think-tank circle jerks, we’d have a pressure valve for our still-exploding demand for fuel, fuel, fuel. It indicates that there’s no serious planning for so-called energy independence, whatever that is: our foreign policy still revolves around petrol-and-pipeline states.

We’re rapidly approaching the comico-tragic state of an armed robber discovering that the 7-11 has only got fifty bucks in the register, or perhaps more accurately, a mergers and acquisitions guy who finds out that that bright-n-shiny new subsidiary is all paper profits, unpaid vendor contracts, and broken office equipment.

RETREAT!

In my neck of the woods, The Corner is a place where you can get some cheap crack and a cheaper lady friend, but out there in yon internet, The Corner is a place where you can find Stanley Kurtz opining that the real problem with Americans is that war makes them tired, unless they’re conservatives, in which case the affliction is more a case of psychic enervation brought on by the “taunts of the left.” “America’s domestic divisions are paralyzing us at a critical moment!” Lions and tigers and bears!

The student of 10th-grade history in me wants to point out that if Kurtz bothered to read the Constitution and the goddamn Federalist Papers, he’d better understand that a little paralysis was built into the damn system. I suspect that sort of thing would fall on deaf ears, however.

The truth is that these gentlemen long for war because the current one is going badly and the specter of peace is boring. Hence Bill Kristol’s cracks about the salons and drawing rooms of Georgetown and Paris, or what have you. The business of diplomacy bores them. The business of domestic politics, ye gods, even more so. Neither Stan Kurtz nor Bill Kristol ever could or ever would fight in a war, no more than the fat slob at the other end of the bar ever could or ever would play in the NFL. But in both cases, it makes them feel like better men, bigger men, manlier men, if they can bitch about the coaching and complain that the hometown crowd is made up of nothing but fair-weather fans.

If it were David Koresh, now . . .

Despite the dessicated corpse of the One True Church's current moral standing, our official media treat the news out of Rome as if it is indeed but one spokesman removed from Gabriel. So today the Times rather breathlessly reports that Pope Hitler-Jugend I might-just-possibly-maybe-but-not-necessarily be considering some piecemeal reversal of Catholic lunacy doctrine on condoms. The church's biggest growth is now in Africa. Africans are beset by the specter of AIDS. Etc., etc., etc. The theology, we're told, is complicated.

Imagine that you had some David Koresh-type figure operating in the intermountain boondocks. Imagine that his cult was in the midst of a relatively rapid expansion. Imagine that it was awash with sexual infidelities and indiscretions. Imagine that 50% of the adult population of his compound was infected with HIV. Imagine that High Priest Joe McWorshipme refused them condoms because his "complex" theology indicated that the invisible sun god wouldn't countenance the spilling of seed.

Janet Reno and a SWAT army would descend on that fucker faster than you can say John Ashcroft. We'd set the place on fire and send tanks through the walls. The FBI would surround the place with snipers and pick off the adult males.

I'm just sayin . . .

Professor

It's time for another round of "What Are You Talking About, Andrew Sullivan?":

One of the least remarked-upon facets of recent years has been the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the academic left. While they control many humanities departments, and have filled the minds of many young people with idiocies it will take them years to shuck off, they have almost no substantive contribution to make to American society. Many enclaves of the academic left have actively longed for the defeat of the U.S. in Iraq; and are ambivalent between the West and its Islamist enemies. I think particularly of the gay academic left, so busy tying themselves into "queer studies" knots that they were utterly absent in the battles for marriage equality and military service. (And when they were not absent, they were busy criticizing advocates for gay equality for being "assimilationist.")

Given the knowledge that Candy Andy writes for Time, which is about one step removed from Highlights, I should be less surprised by the utter infelicity of his prose, but really, Andy . . .

Years don't have facets, and even presuming that they did, and further that one of the facets of said jewel-like year was "the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the academic left," it would hardly be one of the least remarked-upon, owing in large part to the logghoreac outgushing of Horowitzian inadequacies projected by David Horowitz Himself on just about everyone to the "left" of Franco.

Otherwise it's standard, boilerplate recitation of the old undergraduates-as-empty-vessels canard, in which the poor osmotic retards are filled with "idiocies" that they have neither choice in accepting nor capacity to reject after any short passage of time. The enclaves of leftism long for US defeat, since they remain ambivalent about (which Andy repalces, inexplicably, with "between") the relative superiority of the West and Islam, or the Islamic enemies, or SOMEONE, goddamnit, apparently blithely unconcerned that radical monotheism of any stripe is no great friend of the cultural attitudes of contemporary critical theory. Criticism of such-and-such, in Andy's world, is always taken as implicit condonement of whatever mirror-image so-and-so that's been designated, this week or this decade, as The Enemy. It does not require great learnedness nor incisive critical faculties to realize that complaints about Chevies don't necessarily make a fellow a Ford man. Whatever you think of the so-called academic left, you can't deny that the dramatis personae of global ills populating the current critical-studies imagination is more complex and well populated than the juvenile Manicheanism en vogue in policy-and-prattle circles these days. I don't imagine many queer studies profs, whom Andy takes down with all the ferocity of a kitten attacking a ball of yarn, operate under the illusion that some kind of global emirate is the ideal political circumstance in which the investigate the hermeneutics of queer identity in the late novels of George Eliot, or what have you.

As a parting note, Andy's classic narcissism is on gaudy display in the last sentence of that excerpt, isn't it? Other queers have questioned the immediate desirability of the two policy proposals that are dear to Candy Andy's heart, ergo they are enemies of the Cause of Equality. The irony--that half of the equality Andy mentions involves dying abroad for a vicious lie, perhaps after killing some Islamic Enemies by oneself--is apparent to us, but not to our sage columnist, who's very sure there's something wrong with the world today, and who's even surer that none of it is his fault.

Iraq is like a restaurant . . .

In Anthony Bordain's funny, insider send-up of the restaurant industry and his own career, Kitchen Confidential, he makes the point--self-evident when you think about it--that once a new joint begins to fail, it almost inevitably fails. In between, there's usually an excruciating period of concept changes, staff swap-outs, misbegotten special offers, over-comping of drinks and dinners, pleas to the press for new and better reviews, etc. The cute Parisian bistro becomes a Roman trattoria, becomes a pan-Mediterranean café, becomes an Asian-infused New American throwback. Flare-out. Sale sign.

This, in turn, seems more or less the model for our current "strategy" in Iraq, as evidenced in this NY Times story on the Army's new counterinsurgency training in mock Iraqi villages out in the Mojave Desert. It's probably admirable in some cosmically unimportant way that Chef Rumsfeld is willing to jettison all those heavy sauces for grilling and seasonal cuisine, but as regards our enterprise in the Middle East, I regret to say that our falafel, so to speak, appears to be well and fully fried.